About the Blog

I will post a new entry every few weeks. Some will be new writing and some will be past work that has relevance today. The writing will deal in some way with the themes that have been part of my teaching and writing life for decades:

•teaching and learning;•educational opportunity;•the importance of public education in a democracy;•definitions of intelligence and the many manifestations of intelligence in school, work, and everyday life; and•the creation of a robust and humane philosophy of education.

If I had to sum up the philosophical thread that runs through my work, it would be this: A deep belief in the ability of the common person, a commitment to educational, occupational, and cultural opportunity to develop that ability, and an affirmation of public institutions and the public sphere as vehicles for nurturing and expressing that ability.

My hope is that this blog will foster an online community that brings people together to continue the discussion.

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Thursday, June 23, 2016

"Grit"
is in the news again big time with the appearance of Angela Duckworth's
alliterative best-seller Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. I
wrote about both the conceptual and methodological problems with grit last
year, and given the attention Professor Duckworth's book is attracting, I
thought it would be worthwhile to repost what I wrote below and add a few
thoughts here.

The book is drawing its share
of mixed and negative reviews for superficiality bordering on pop psychology,
for its narrow conception of character, for its focus on individual personality
traits over social and economic factors, and for problems with methodology.
Most of these characteristics were evident in Professor Duckworth's work long
before the publication of her book, but it seems that they got amplified as she
(and most likely her editor) prepared her book for a general audience.

Given the number of mixed to
negative reviews, it would seem that the opinion-makers are finally countering
their original enthusiasm for grit. The ledger is balanced. Those of us with
concerns about grit can relax.

Well, no. The meteoric rise of
grit reveals troubling problems in the formation of our public discourse about
education. I and many others have written about our policy maker's culpability
in the formation of this discourse, but here I'd like to consider another
dimension of the circumstances that give rise to phenomena like the one we’re
witnessing with grit.

With
some notable exceptions, not many journalists who cover education--and even
fewer opinion page columnists--have a solid background in the field. The people
who review the few books on education that get coverage--most of which are
written by other journalists--are often culture critic types who are bright, to
be sure, but not schooled on schooling...so they go to school quickly on the
Internet, which will yield the mega-hit hot topics (grit, for example) and the
people who champion them. This state of affairs hardly generates the kind of
knowledge (and more to the point, understanding) that complex topics in
education demand. Every concern now being raised about grit was there in plain
sight for anyone who did some homework and consulted with a few dispassionate
psychological or educational researchers. Oh, that those who contributed to the
original frenzy had done so.

The situation I just described
leads to a small and closed circle of voices. The concept of grit got the huge
attention it did because it was seen as a way to help poor kids persevere in
school and achieve their way out of poverty. When the journalists and other
writers I mention above are astute enough to question such claims and want to
underscore the challenges of poverty, they will find via their search engines
trending books and reports on education and poverty that suffer from the same
one-dimensional and hot-topic focus as the treatments of psychological traits
and character education. So we end up with a constrained, sometimes
problematic, concept of poverty used to counter a constrained, sometimes
problematic, concept of character.

I'm not sure how we get out of
this mess, though I've been thinking a lot about it lately. I'll post those
thoughts as soon as I can tame them into coherence.

***

One
of the many frustrating things about education policy and practice in our
country is the continual search for the magic bullet—and all the hype and trite
lingo that bursts up around it.One such
bullet is the latest incarnation of character education, particularly the
enthrallment with “grit,” a buzz word for perseverance and determination.Readers of this blog are familiar with my
concerns and can read my earlier posts by clicking here,
or go to a 2014
report on character and opportunity from the Brookings Institution in which
I have a brief cautionary essay. I pulled much of this material together in
"Being Careful about Character," a chapter in the 2014 revised
edition of Why School?.

In
a nutshell, I worry about the limited success of past attempts at character
education and the danger in our pendulum-swing society that we will shift our
attention from improving subject matter instruction.I also question the easy distinctions made
between “cognitive” and “non-cognitive” skills.And I fear that we will sacrifice policies aimed at reducing poverty for
interventions to change the way poor people see the world.

In
this post, I would like to further explore these concerns—and a few new ones—by
focusing on “grit,” for it has so captured the fancy of our policy makers,
administrators, and opinion-makers.

Grit’s
rise to glory is something to behold, a case study in the sociology of
knowledge.If you go back ten or so
years, you’ll find University of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela Duckworth
investigating the role of perseverance in achievement.This idea is not new in the study of
personality and individual differences, but Duckworth was trying to more
precisely define and isolate perseverance or persistence as an important
personality trait via factor analysis, a standard statistical tool in
personality psychology.Through a series
of studies of high-achieving populations (for example, Penn undergraduates,
West Point cadets, Spelling Bee champions), Duckworth and her colleagues
demonstrated that this perseverance quality might be distinct from other
qualities (such as intelligence or self control) and seemed to account for
between 1.4 to 6.3 percent of all that goes into the achievements of those
studied.(Later studies would find
several higher percentages.)These
findings suggest that over ninety percent of her populations’ achievements are
accounted for by other personal, familial, environmental, and cultural factors,
but, still, her findings are important and make a contribution to the academic
study of personality—and support a commonsense belief that hard work over time
pays off.

It
is instructive to read Duckworth’s foundational scholarly articles, something I
suspect few staffers and no policy makers have done.The articles are revealing in their listing
of qualifications and limitations: The original studies rely on self-report
questionnaires, so can be subject to error and bias.The studies are correlational, so do not
demonstrate causality.The exceptional
qualities of some of the populations studied can create problems for factor
analysis.Perseverance might have a
downside to it.The construct of
perseverance has been studied in some fashion for over a century.

But
Duckworth and her colleagues did something that in retrospect was a brilliant
marketing strategy, a master stroke of branding—or re-branding.Rather than calling their construct
“perseverance” or “persistence,” they chose to call it “grit.”Can you think of a name that has more resonance
in American culture?The fighter who is
all heart.The hardscrabble survivor.True Grit.The Little Train That Could.

Grit
exploded.New York Times
commentators, best-selling journalists, the producers of This American Life,
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, educational policy makers and
administrators all saw the development of grit as a way to improve American
education and, more pointedly, to improve the achievement of poor children who,
everyone seemed to assume, lacked grit.

I’ll
get to that last part about poor kids in a moment, but first I want to ask some
questions few policy makers are asking.What is an education suitable for a democracy?What kind of people are we trying to
develop?What is our philosophy of
education?With these questions in mind,
let’s consider some items taken from the two instruments Duckworth and
colleagues have used in their studies.The items are listed under grit’s two subscales, the factors that
comprise grit:

Consistency of Interests Subscale:

· New ideas and
projects sometimes distract me from previous ones.

· I have been
obsessed with a certain idea or project for a short time but later lost
interest.

· I often set a goal
but later choose to pursue a different one.

Perseverance of Effort Subscale:

·
Setbacks don’t discourage me.

· I
finish whatever I begin.

· I have
achieved a goal that took years of work.

These items are answered on a
five-point scale:

Very much like me

Mostly like me

Somewhat like me

Not much like me

Not like me at all

Let
me repeat here what I’ve written in every other commentary on grit.Of course, perseverance is an important
characteristic.I cherish it in my
friends and my students. But at certain ages and certain times in our
lives, exploration and testing new waters can also contribute to one’s
development and achievement.Knowing
when something is not working is important as well.Perseverance and determination as represented
in the grit questionnaires could suggest a lack of flexibility, tunnel vision,
an inability to learn from mistakes.Again, my point is not to dismiss perseverance but to suggest that
perseverance, or grit, or any quality works in tandem with other qualities in
the well-functioning and ethical person.By focusing so heavily on grit, character education in some settings has
been virtually reduced to a single quality, and probably not the best quality
in the content of character.The items
in the grit instruments could describe the brilliant surgeon who is a distant
and absent parent, or, for that fact, the smart, ambitious, amoral people who
triggered the Great Recession. (Macbeth with his “vaulting ambition” would
score quite high on grit.)Education in
America has to be about more than producing driven super-achievers.For that fact, a discussion of what we mean
by “achievement” is long overdue.

But,
of course, a good deal of the discussion of grit doesn’t really involve all
students.Regardless of disclaimers, the
primary audience for our era’s character education is poor kids.As I and a host of others have written, a
focus on individual characteristics of low-income children can take our
attention away from the structural inequalities they face.Some proponents of character education have
pretty much said that an infusion of grit will achieve what social and economic
interventions cannot.

Can
I make a recommendation?Along with the
grit survey, let us give another survey and see what the relationship is
between the scores.I’m not sure what to
call this new survey, but it would provide a measure of adversity, of
impediments to persistence, concentration, and the like.It, too, would use a five-point response
scale: “very much like me” to “not much like me.”Its items would include:

·
I always have bus fare to get to school.

·
I hear my parents talking about not having enough money for the rent.

·
Whenever I get sick, I am able to go to a doctor.

·
We always have enough food in our home.

·
I worry about getting to school safely.

·
There are times when I have to stay home to care for younger brothers or
sisters.

·
My school has honors and Advanced Placement classes.

·
I have at least one teacher who cares about me.

My
guess is that higher impediment scores would be linked to lower scores on the
grit survey.I realize that what grit
advocates want is to help young people better cope with such hardship.Anyone who has worked seriously with kids in
tough circumstances spends a lot of time providing support and advice, and if
grit interventions can provide an additional resource, great.But if as a society we are not also working
to improve the educational and economic realities these young people face, then
we are engaging in a cruel hoax, building aspiration and determination for a
world that will not fulfill either.

The
foundational grit research primarily involved populations of elite high
achievers—Ivy League students, West Point cadets, National Spelling Bee
contestants—and people responding to a Positive Psychology website based at the
University of Pennsylvania.It is from
the latter population that the researchers got a wider range of ages and data
on employment history.

I
was not able to find socioeconomic information for these populations, but given
what we know generally about Ivy League undergraduates, West Point cadets,
etc., I think it is a safe guess that most come from stable economic
backgrounds.(In one later study,
Duckworth and colleagues drew on 7-11 grade students at a “socioeconomically
and ethnically diverse magnet public school” where 18% of the students were
low-income—that’s some economic diversity, but not a school with concentrated
disadvantage.)It is also safe to assume
that the majority of the people who are interested in Positive Psychology and
self-select to respond to an on-line questionnaire have middle-class employment
histories with companies or in professions that have pathways and mechanisms
for advancement.So the construct of
grit and the instruments to measure it are largely based on populations that
more likely than not are able to pursue their interests and goals along a
landscape of resources and opportunity.This does not detract from the effort they expend or from their
determination, but it does suggest that their grit is deployed in a world quite
different from the world poor people inhabit.

It
is hard to finish what you begin when food and housing are unstable, or when
you have three or four teachers in a given year, or when there are few people
around who are able to guide and direct you.It is equally hard to pursue a career with consistency when the jobs
available to you are low-wage, short-term and vulnerable, and have few if any
benefits or protections.This certainly
doesn’t mean that people who are poor lack determination and resolve.Some of the poor people I knew growing up or
work with today possess off-the-charts determination to survive, put food on
the table, care for their kids.But they
wouldn’t necessarily score high on the grit scale.

Personality
psychology by its disciplinary norms concentrates on the individual, but
individual traits and qualities, regardless of how they originate and develop,
manifest themselves in social and institutional contexts.Are we educators and policy makers creating
classrooms that are challenging and engaging enough to invite
perseverance?Are we creating
opportunity for further educational or occupational programs that enable
consistency of effort?Are we gritty
enough to keep working toward these goals without distraction over the long
haul?

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